Savage Worlds Pathfinder, Part 3: Creativity versus Linear Play

A dungeon is the classic example of linear play. You are presented with a choice, left or right. You don't have that much information to go on, except maybe if the referee is smart and drops hints about "a strange smell coming from the right" or "the sounds of shuffling and scratching from the left." At least you have something to go on, but you are still limited to two directions. Go left or right, and you are presented with a similar choice, go through the door or down the hallway further.

You aren't really thinking, you are reacting here. You are trapped in a maze. Your freedom to make decisions and alter the course of the adventure is blocked off by cold stone walls. You are expected to be the rat in the maze, wander around, and fight against oppressive limitations to show some individuality. There is the illusion of choice, but there really isn't much choice except for, "where do we go next?" Watch this:

That is a fun video and I recommend watching all of the ones dealing with torches and roleplaying. Good stuff, and it touches on the sort of "real world tombs and crawlspaces" feeling with cramped corridors, vaulted ceilings, and cool-looking pulp-inspired places. Pulp-inspired kind of veers off the historical-realism track (for fun's sake), but again, pulp-inspired isn't "100 rooms with twisty corridors" either.

Contrast this with non-linear play. You are a cowboy walking into an Old West town. Go from there. Do you rob the stagecoach? Do you wander into the saloon and look for trouble? Do you respond to that "help wanted" poster on the sheriff's office? Do you stand up for that lanky prospector being ruffled up by the local ruffians? Do you watch as the two gunfighters stare each other down?

You are only limited by the hooks and opportunities the referee presents to you. You area free agent, and you are free to chase down whatever hare-brained idea or silly course of action you can imagine. Like an open-world sandbox game, whatever you do is fine. A great referee will improvise and wing it for the whole session, and react to whatever the players come up with on the fly.

Dungeons are easy, and they focus the group's attention on one situation and location. They are useful and create tension, but after a while, they begin to feel artificial and limiting. There are no other options but "door A" and "hall B." Our group has done them to the point where dungeon based modules elicit groans from my players.

So in our Savage Worlds: Pathfinder game, we are banning dungeons. No more holes in the ground, we are tired of them. There still can be lost tombs, ancient ruins, or similar pulp-inspired sites of mystery and wonder - but not to the extent where being a mouse wandering the maze is the point of the game. If it has more than a handful of rooms or passages, forget it, we are not interested. It isn't like historically, here on Earth, there have been great examples of massive underground dungeon complexes.

Still, a pulp-inspired underground massive ritual chamber is fine. A giant maze where you have to map and wander around aimlessly is not. A lost tomb with a central corridor and adjoining chambers (for mummies to break out of) is fine, a tomb that takes up an entire piece of graph paper where the entire session is spent lost in the corridors is not. Pulp-adventure means classic action-movie inspired sets and locations, real Temple of Doom stuff, and fun and dynamic locations.

Like the stuff you see in the books, and exactly like the above. I admit, the Paizo team does a good job trying to make their adventures and world exciting, action-inspired, and fun looking - but I get this sense the d20 tactical dungeon rules fight them. The rules drag the world down. What looks fun on the cover in reality, at least when we play, is a mess of stat-blocks, slow-playing rules, tracking conditions, slow combat, and slogging through a rules system that should be "fast, fun and easy to play" but isn't. Especially now with all the books and additions to the core system.

I want the game to play like the pictures. I do not care about supporting rules which get in the way of fun. A fighter is a someone who knows how to use a sword. A mage knows magic. A thief is sneaky. Powers are powers. People learn the things they choose to learn. The people in the artwork do not have leg shackles on them chained to large iron d20s. They are "adventurers" in any game system. That mage above? Just casting a spell, and in my game, something from the Savage Worlds rules. And something not converted over, and no-one in this world speaks of levels, alignment, classes, or magic missile.

It seems dictatorial, but conversions like this are notoriously weak-legged, with that feeling of "lets go back" to the original rules hanging over the game. Being clear on "what this game is going to be like" helps a referee keep it on track, helps players know what they are getting into and how to act, and it sets expectations on how much of the original source material from the rules is going to be used. You don't want to be playing, have a player expecting to play a specific "mesmerist" or some other in-the-game class, and have that player expecting one thing while the game is doing another.

In this case, none of it. The Inner Sea World Guide is the game's bible for "what the world is" and "who lives there." That cover sets the tone for the game. The pictures of adventures and battles inside also set the tone. The peoples and places inside exist in this world.

And then the Savage Worlds rulebook is thrown down, right on top. These are the rules. This is how this world works. You should be good from here. This is how the game works, how it will be run, and other Pathfinder rules-focused books will be ignored.

End. Stop. No new books needed. Except maybe...

...and here is where the tricky part comes in. I am going to put up a yellow light when the question of "monsters" comes up. You may want to go with the standard monster list. It's easy. You may want to crack open the bestiary book to pull in some foes, and then find yourself converting monsters over. And then the slow drag of "it would be easier to go back" starts to be felt.

My advice? Don't do it. It's a trap! Stick with the monsters with in the Fantasy Companion. "Re-skin" them, if needed to look and act like the monsters you need. Remember, you are going for "pulp-adventure" not a "d20 simulator." You absolutely do not need a complete monster list to run this game; some orcs, skeletons, zombies, and a big boss beast is fine and will get your adventure through many nights. Most players probably won't notice your monster list isn't the "complete Pathfinder approved" monster list. As long as you have one or two of the recognizable "fantasy monster types" you are fine.

You are fine.

And here is where you can have some fun. You can invent new monsters now. If you reject the "standard" list, you can invent cool new monsters like a fire-elemental mummy that vomits lava and is immune to fire magic, and all of a sudden - no one knows what to expect next. Your game goes from the familiar classic-rock playlist of the d20 "greatest hits" monsters to something cool, all yours, and unique. You can mix in the old standards once and a while, mod them, or make new monsters based on your imagination.

It's like that monster on the cover of the Bestiary, the "giant troll" thing in the background. I don't care to go and look that up in the Bestiary, I will say that is a giant troll and I will go and find some stat-block for a giant in the Fantasy Companion and give it regeneration and a weakness to fire, and blammo, you are done. A giant that regenerates? Color me terrified as a player in this game and trying to deal with a beast like this. If you were a slave to the "official monster list" your mind will not be thinking like this, and you will lose all of your creativity and imagination.

Do that. Look at the pictures in the books, and come up with your own creations. That flaming dog in that picture is an "inferno hound" and then go wild giving it powers and weaknesses based on what it looks like. Your imagination and silly creations will make this game special. Refusing to be a slave to the "official lists and rules" will be your freedom. Don't go too wild, a normal griffon is still a griffon fro mthe book, but for the special and memorable monsters, have fun.

Same with magic. Same with powers. Same with magic items. Same with heroes. Same with everything. You are free to be inspired by the pictures, not ruled by the words.

Your players are not grading you on how well your conversion looks like the source material. They will not judge you that a "giant troll" doesn't exist in the Bestiary and "you obviously made something up." Gasp! The horror of doing something not by the official rules! Your game is invalid! You obviously aren't as creative as the books you paid for. You will never be able to play in a store or convention game again. Really? Sarcasm over, but honestly, these feelings come up when you dare to be creative and do your own thing. It's a byproduct of companies wanting to sell you more books, and that is their right, but never let the fear of an "official seal of approval" stop you from doing anything.

It's your game. Players are here to have fun. They will judge you if your game was interesting, fast paced, fun, and it provided a great night of entertainment.

The more input you have in your world, the better it will be. But the number one thing getting in your way of having fun is yourself and your slavish loyalty to a stack of books. You need to break those chains for this to be fun. So go ahead and break them.

MMO Games versus Social Games

I tell you, our discussions about game design as super interesting. I ran yesterday's article about "escalating hit points" by DarkgarX the other day, and he predictably had the same reaction, "Escalating hit point systems suck!"

So we talked about it for a while, and we managed to come to an interesting conclusion:

• Some pen-and-paper games are more MMO Roleplaying games
• Some pen-and-paper games are more Social Roleplaying games

Eureka! I thought, and we had this interesting discussion on what makes something more an MMO game than a Social Roleplaying game. I suppose we need some definitions first:

Social RPG: A roleplaying game where social interactions are the primary determining factor in determining success. Combat is a social interaction or the end thereof, and conflict is balanced on one-to-one fights.

MMO RPG (or Party-Based RPG): A roleplaying game where combat is the primary determining factor in determining success. Combat is balanced on many-to-one fights, where a party works together to defeat a foe or group of foes. Combat is a group-based gameplay function and less of a social interaction.

It is an interesting definition, because a lot of things start to make sense. In a game where a PC plays "Dirty Harry", the character's weapon needs to be powerful and a tool of social interaction. Combat needs to be quick and deadly, because how is a single character supposed to make a threat and hold someone off? This is a Social RPG, and weapons and combat in these sorts of games tend to be quick and deadly, and one character can defeat a foe in one blow because that threat needs to exist when violence is used as a tool of interaction between characters and bad guys.

In a MMO RPG, weapons need to be balanced for the party's contributions. Your longsword does 1d8+2, or an average of 7 points of damage. The big boss monster has 60 hit points. Is the boss monster afraid of one sword blow? Probably not. But your 5 person party is doing 7 points each per turn, so that's 35 points of damage potentially in the first volley. That is a threat. The party is the social threat, not one person. Your character is weaker socially with a singular one-on-one threat of violence, but your party is the social group making the interaction with violence here.

In a MMO, that one-on-one social contract many players assume is there with a Dirty Harry "make my day" threat does not exist. That is for the party to say, "make our day." It is a strange way to view things, but it works. Some games cater to the one-on-one interactions, and make violence and combat powerful enough for those one-on-one threats to hold water. These are Social RPGs, where they can be played between two people, a single character feels like they have the power to make threats and changes because a single character matters.

In MMO games, the group matters more than one-on-one interactions. This is why MMOs in general are more popular for groups of people, since it takes a party to get a goal done. You can do one-on-one roleplaying with an MMO RPG, but that social contract of the thief holding a dagger on someone needs to be specially considered with a coup de grace rule because the game is by default setup for a party to be contributing towards a goal, not a single person. One-on-one roleplaying exists in these games, but the social power comes from the "all for one" party and not the individual.

In a MMO RPG, you need escalating hit points. You need to balance things so the party as a contributing whole is the determining factor, instead of the one-on-one fights. The play of a battle matters, and things like boss monsters can exist. Because you don't want every fight at the table to end on turn one, things need to have some play to them and be tough. You can have a 40 hit point giant. You are a part of a team, and that team works together to solve threats and take action.

In a Social RPG, you can get away with using a flat system where weapon damages and hit points do not scale with character power. That 0.38 pistol will always be powerful and a threat. It needs to be because in a more social one-on-one interaction, you need those threats to hold water so you can roleplay them without your mind saying "OMG, that does a d6 damage! He has at least 50 hit points. Not a threat!" You can scale skill and the ability to defend or to-hit, but weapons powers should be high and fights should be deadly because that weapon represents the end-all of a threat made in a social context. That social interaction needs to have weight behind it. Combat needs to be balanced for the one-on-one and deadly.

It is an interesting difference between the style and play of these types of games, and these definitions clean up a lot of how we talk about games. Is this more of a social game? Is this mechanic more party-based and MMO-ish? Is this game's combat system more social-based, or does it assume the party is the driving force?

And a lot of our arguments about which game is better for what have cleared up between us because we can now say "this type of rule is better for social games," or, "this game is better for MMO or party-based play."

Sometimes a disagreement happens is because there is no common definition between the two sides.

Your 15 Minutes of Adventure Are Up

D&D 3E introduced us to this wonderful concept of the 15-minute adventuring day. It goes something like this:

"Hey guys, I used all my spells in that last encounter. Let's go back to town and rest."

Now, this existed before 3E to be fair, and this issue has really been seen more with D&D than other role playing games. Part of the problem is D&D itself, adventures are designed around a series of encounters with CRs that are supposed to balance play and use up resources at a predictable rate. This does not always work, and I feel CR misleads us in a number of ways:

• Randomness leads to greater or lesser resource usage
• The CR system is too simplistic to deal with the complexity of the game's classes and powers
• Players don't care about balanced fights and "burn down" every encounter

The first one is interesting, and yes, a series of bad rolls will double or use up your entire excursion's resources (spells, potions, powers) and you are stuck. Since the rest of the encounters in the dungeon were carefully balanced around you having some resources to deal with it, it's game over man, time to bug out. One encounter drops your party resources to zero, and if this is a "one time only" dungeon with an objective (like most should be), you have lost. That's it. Bad dice have let the bad guy get away with the princess, and that's the knocks of a story-based game.

Yes, the d20 with its wide variance is partially to blame here, it isn't the best die to use if you want a strong average, but with D&D it's what we got.

Another side note. D&D 4E tried to solve this problem with at-wills and encounter powers. the designers of D&D 4 were trying to solve a lot of problems, and this one they did a pretty good job at (tactical miniatures wise, not role playing wise). They introduced the concept of regenerating powers and healing surges, and that kept the party going into the next part of the story. For story-gaming, D&D 4 had a lot of nice improvements over D&D 1-3 and D&D 5. Mind you, the design of D&D 4 did not lend itself to roleplaying all that well, but as a tactical miniatures game where you played stories, it was interesting (counting the first 3 books or so before everything started going to the lower planes).

The second point is also interesting. In some ways I feel the CR system is overly simplistic and it does not take a lot of factors into account. One the other side, if it did the CR calculation system would be something as complex as calculus to figure out encounter balance. With Pathfinder, I have seen reports that modules designed against earlier versions of the game are now too easy with the power creep introduced in later books, and that encounters need to be toughened up to be a challenge again. Old CR does not equal the new CR, and the rating slips as time goes on.

Burn downs. This I have been waiting to talk about, because every player coming from an MMO knows about this one, and this is how most videogames train players nowadays. When you are in a MMO, in each encounter you 100% burn down all your powers and abilities in order to beat it. It does not matter if it is a hall fight or a boss fight, you keep pressing every button, keep hitting every power as its timer comes up, and maximize your damage output to 100% in every fight. In the old Everquest, this wasn't the case and you had to practice careful resource management through a zone. Past that, most modern MMOs make you burn down as fast as possible in order to get through a fight.

The reason? It's flashy! It's more exciting! It solves players from complaining the dungeon is too hard and filling up your customer service system with too many tickets.

So many videogame and MMO players are trained to burn down.

Now, many players get it when they begin playing pen-and-paper. They get the careful resource management game. The games fight this though, and try to make things easier on players by giving them infinite-use attack cantrips (D&D 5), or multi-shot built-in class attack powers (Pathfinder). D&D 4 had infinite-use at-will powers and auto-recharging encounter powers. Even 3E had a plethora of multi-use wands, scrolls, and other items that let you blast away with rechargable wands of magic missiles and fireball staffs. You see the burn-down starting to creep back in.

Player power has increased dramatically over the last 15 years of D&D to keep up with the MMO arms and expectation race.

Personally? I find burn downs boring and resource management more compelling. I like story-based play (a separate topic entirely), but I appreciate games that force you to make hard choices.

In old-school gaming like Basic Fantasy or Labyrinth Lord, giving a magic user infinite ranged attack cantrips would be unthinkable. Today, shooty and flashy are the new thing and the new norms. In the past, you didn't doll up with magic items and carry around enough rechargable magic items to blow through days of content. If your DM was stingy, you pulled the "go back to town" thing. If he wasn't, you loaded up for bear with enough magic to blow a hole in the side of White Plume Mountain.

In older editions of D&D and today's OGR games, the magic item economy is sparse, and you don't get into it as much. A wand of magic missiles is rare and special. A +1 sword is Excalibur. You survive on your wits and a player's ability to coax room descriptions out of the DM's head to avoid the trap of doom in the next room. Then again, the story in old-school games was a lot like today's 'sandbox" games. Do you survive? What do you do? Old-school games focused on the stories of the characters in that personal survival story, and not the DM's or module writer's story.

I blame Vampire: The Masquerade back in AD&D 2E days for this "module as story" stuff really. Vampire showed us a wonderful roleplaying game focused on personal stories, and AD&D had to follow suite and try to make dungeoning "story gaming" as well. Vampire did story gaming elegantly. AD&D had a lot more trouble making that leap because of the abstraction and resource management, and that theme of "story dungeoning" has stayed with us ever since, even across 3E's magic-card-if-i-cation of the rules.

So this pesky resource management game is getting in the way of completing tonight's story dungeon! Let's punt, take a mulligan, and head back to town to ignore this archaic D&D resource management system and continue on, shall we? If you are going to be in any way realistic about this dungeon master and reset the encounters, make us roll for wilderness encounters, or make us 'lose' the story for taking a break in the middle, then I guess you are a horrible dungeon master who hates well-told stories and famous module designers, right?

I am being sarcastic, but I have had those feelings come up at my table before so they are there.

There is an internal struggle here that I feel D&D has never gotten over. There is a simulation side to old-school D&D with the resource game, and if you have never played an old-school game, I recommend you do to see what I am talking about. It is a different game. Health does not auto-recharge. What you take in is it for possibly 100 rooms. The game is simple and deadly. Characters die frequently. You struggle. There is a mental game going on where you pry descriptions out of the DM, be clever, avoid fights, and survive.

3E and Pathfinder? Stuck in the middle of storytelling and resource management. Deck-building RPGs at heart.

4E and D&D 5E? Storytelling games at their heart and trying hard to shed old-school D&D's resource management game. Heavily MMO-influenced with recharging and infinite-use powers, with D&D 4 being the more MMO game, but D&D 5 shooting for the feel of 2E's story-dungeoning feel.

None of them are bad, and players love each for different reasons. This is not an argument one is better than another. You play what you love. But, you need to understand what each one brings, and where the conflicts are. If I ran D&D 5, I would go for more story than resource management, because that's what that game does best. I would adjust the story if players felt their party needed to take five, and advance the story in a logical way that reflects them having to take a breather. The show would go on. There wouldn't be a 15-minute adventuring day because the story reacts.

In old-school games? Yes, you can bet I would come down like a ton of bricks on a party that wasted its resources in wasteful burn-downs and had to retreat to town. Old school games are the Old Testament of resource management sims. Roll for wilderness encounters to and from the dungeon. Roll for wandering monsters all the way down to the point you left off. The dungeon's residents react and adapt to the last incursion, setting up traps, moving to rooms deeper (or to ones you thought you cleared), clearing out, or calling for reinforcements. You take a 15-minute day, and I will make you regret it for the next 15 days, but that is the old-school dungeon master's job.

The trouble comes when the game's designers try to please everybody, and tell you that the game is good for all types of play. It's cool marketing speak, but it isn't true. Some games do things better than others, and that's okay. Another problem arises when the game's designers put in systems geared to resource management when the game shines in story-based play. I can't blame them, the marketers said 'make it appeal to everybody' so sometimes you get systems in games better ignored than used. It happens, and game design isn't a perfect science.

Know what you like. Know what your players like. Most importantly, know what you expect from a game, and how a game shapes that experience.

Taking a 10 and 20

D&D 4 and D&D 5 mostly did away with the concept of taking a 10 or 20 on a skill roll, yet this still lives on in the Pathfinder game. The concept of the "take a 20" mechanic is this:

If I spend so much time at the task that I iterate through every possible roll, I will at least roll a 20 once in those tries and succeed.

So you trade time for certain success. With taking a 10, you choose to take an average roll. You can check out the rules here on the d20 SRD. We have always had a couple problems with the entire take a ten or twenty mechanic, so here it goes.

Statistics 101

First off, assuming you will get a 20 in this period of time would have driven my statistics professor crazy. He would have come right back at me and said "you could roll 100 times, or even 200 times and you are never guaranteed a 20 in that sequence, the probability goes up, but it is never a certain thing." With taking a 10, there is no such thing as an 'average' roll on a single test. The average on one test is the roll, whatever that may be. Again, my statistics professor would have called BS on both these mechanics.

But Really, in Play...

I don't have the same problem my statistics professor has, because I know these rules are shortcuts to simplify and speed up play. Take a 10 though, yeah, I still have a problem with that since it feels so nonsensical.

First off, taking a 20, the real reason this bugs me is because D&D 3 and all variants accept the fact that you can retry all skills indefinitely. Forever. You can buffalo your way through any skill check by rolling again, and again, and again until the end of time. If you imagine this with a social skill check trying to convince a king to lend you his magic sword, it goes something like this:

"Can I have your magic sword, my king?"
"No."
"I need it to defeat the dragon, may I have it sire?"
"No."
"My chances of rescuing the princess would be greatly increased-"
"No."
"Can I?"
"No."
"Can I have it?"
"No."
"Can I?"
"No."
"Can-"
"No."
"Can I? Can I? Can I? Can I? Can I? Can I?"
"No."
"..."
"No."
"Can I?"
"Okay, take it."

Like any interaction with a three-year old, it assumes the DC you set for any task is merely an annoyance for the players to brute force their way past. We grew up with atomic "pass-fail" skill checks. If your thief blew his lockpicking roll, that was it, that lock could not be picked until the thief raised their lockpicking skill and knew some new tricks to try again. The concept of taking a 10 or a 20 to get automatic success felt alien at the time 3E was released, and truthfully, it still feels strange to us today.

Roleplaying, the Great Second Chance

Yes, there are certain times you should be able to make a second attempt. Let's say you are trying to make a persuasion roll and blow the first one. Normally, that should be it, the person refuses and you need to find another way. However, the player is clever and changes their tack with a second offer, roleplaying out a great 'other reason' why the person should go along with the plan. As a referee, I would allow a second check, but at a penalty since this person is already negatively inclined against this persuasion attempt, and second chances should be rare. But it was a great reason and fit within roleplaying, so it should be allowed for fairness. A third try? At that point you are begging, and I would disallow it, or put such a penalty on the attempt you would have to be a saint with a blessed d20 to succeed.

The king would give you a funny look though. Really?

But yes, great roleplaying should be the basis on which second tries are allowed. There is a limit, of course, but this feels right to me.

Pass-Fail Improv

Pass-fail tests. I love them. If players fail at something, they need to have backup plans or think of another way around, or use another skill. As a good referee, I am not going to tell them to pack up their character sheets, the adventure is over, goodbye and see you next week if the party can't pick a lock. There will be another way in, or the players may be clever enough to figure a way around it. Knock on the door. Climb on the roof. Smoke em out. Something. Just please be more creative than giving up and telling me you take a 20, because I won't let you. that one shot you had was the sole cumulative effort of all you knew, and that was the once shot you had. You rolled a 3 and blew it. Try something else.

As a DM, don't put your adventure in that situation either.

I find players are more creative, start buying backup skills, and become more involved when I use pass-fail tests with them. They understand that moment will not come again, and they make plans in case it fails. They can't sit there and burn time for automatic success, because that's not the way the world works. You can't take a chemistry test until you pass it.

In a movie, when a hero attempts to pick a lock and fails, that is usually never revisited again. The brute in the party kicks it down. The smart kid hacks the computer. Someone tries the window and finds it open. Someone asks, "Is there a back door?" Another character pulls out a welder. Dramatically, it feels right.

Everybody Wins but Nobody Cares

Somewhere, I believe rules like this slipped in because a dungeon master somewhere let his or her players bully them into making successive rolls until they caved in. The player, whoever it was, sat at the table believing that roleplaying was just like a videogame, and you could press that "use skill" button and roll the virtual dice in the CPU again and again until they succeeded.

Player: "What? Come on! I keep trying!"
DM (sighing): "Okay, roll again."

No. Seriously? Life isn't like that. you can't show up at the job interview the next day after they told you to get lost. Your skill roll at this one task was it, and your character gives up trying because it isn't possible. No matter how you feel as a player, you need to figure out another way forward. maybe you shouldn't have skimped on the skill, maybe the task was to tough, or maybe it was just bad luck. Regardless, in that game world, your character failed, and you as the invisible hand of the player must chart a new course and find a new way.

If you roleplay a second chance, I'll give you that. Don't expect it to be easy, and you better have a new angle to come at this problem, but I am fair and love creative play.

Death, the Great Exception

Death is always a great exception to the rule. If your party is fending off a goblin horde, and your thief is trying to pick that lock so everyone can escape, I will let you try again and again until you all fall to goblin blades or get that blasted door open. There may be increasing penalties as each attempt fails. This also feels right. I generally allow in-combat checks as long as there is a chance of grave danger ever present and threatening to strike every turn. In a movie, one character picks the lock while the rest hold off the horde, and everyone is screaming at the thief to get it open.

Out of combat, there is no pressure to succeed, and no life-or-death consequence (yes, even in the grand sense where the princess is behind the door and needs to be set free). With a constant and real threat, yes, I generally allow second chances, and really, this falls under the above "roleplaying" exception for second chances. You are under fire, and need to get the door open. Your character gets second chances because the pressure is on and the adrenaline is pumping. The danger of failure is real. You will succeed. Maybe.

It feels right. It feels dramatically correct and it also reflects real life experiences. Once the threat passes, the pressure is off, and whatever that last check was stands.

Another Exception, Skill-Ups

Let's say your thief fails and comes back to that same lock later with a higher skill level. Yes, I would allow a second check since you learned some new tricks. Or maybe a long amount of time passes, like weeks, then yes, a fresh try could be allowed. This is also being fair, while still staying strong on the pass-fail result of the original check.

This has Always Been How We Played

Really, this has always been how we played roleplaying games. We let the original skill check stand, fail or succeed. We only allowed second chances though creative roleplaying. Players always found another way around, or understood they needed great skills and redundancy of skills and plans to avoid being put in a bad situation by an unlucky skill check.

Taking a 20 felt so lazy to us. It felt like skills checks were inconveniences to play. To us, skill checks were play. Taking a 10 meant nothing, I mean, in what sense could you say "I do an average job" in the chaos of the universe and dungeon crawling where anything could happen?

Even when we play Pathfinder, we disallow taking a 10 or a 20. I would rather just DM fiat "no roll needed" for those simple tasks than to allow a buffalo-through assumption of videogame-inspired try-fail-repeats at my table. If a skill check is that simple, really, why roll? Yes, 3E and Pathfinder say "roll if failure is important and has consequences", but to us, every roll is important and has consequences - because any roll important enough to make at the table should be that important.

Simulation at the Level of Detail

There's a section in Frank Chadwick's classic WW2 miniatures game where he recounts using a squad-level WW2 war game to simulate a massive Eastern Front battle. Squad by squad they played out the gigantic battle, and the by the end they realized the outcome did not reflect reality at all. The battle never came out that way, the squad level individual fights played out, and the entire game kind of fell apart under the weight of improbability.

You can imagine a game of this size, a massive amount of gaming tables, maps covering Poland and Russia, and literally thousands of counters or miniatures tracking every vehicle crew, LMG, engineer squad, field car, tank, and supply unit all being moved in hours-long turns in painstaking detail. Every battle for a farmhouse - simulated. Every meeting engagement on a road - simulated. Each battle for a forest or hedgerow - simulated. Every tank battle - simulated down to each shell fired.

Why didn't it come out just like reality? I mean, it should have, since each man-to-man engagement was handled in painstaking detail, and a result like the one that happened in history should have been the outcome, right?

Part of the outcome of this battle led Mr. Chadwick and his designers to simulate these battles in a larger scale, with larger company and corps level units. They realized that simulating large systems down to the smallest detail does not always provide the best reflection of reality. They found if the smallest unit was a tank company or section, they could get a better overall large scale simulation than if they worried about every gun's ammunition, every broken track, and every individual squad. They could write rules that handled larger groups and simulate the historical real-world happenings of these classic WW2 battles, so thus Command Decision was born.

Of course, we do all this by computer nowadays, so why are WW2 miniatures war game rules important? What does this have to do with tabletop roleplaying?

Because today's pen-and-paper designers still make the same mistakes.

Shouldn't a detailed sectional hit points system with hit locations, rules for slicing tendons, and medical trauma charts more realistically simulate medieval combat? Shouldn't an almost slow-motion martial-arts inspired combat system with half-second turns and action points laid out for every move of the arm, swing of a blade, and pull of the bowstring more accurately simulate personal combat?

If we can simulate that level of detail on a man-to-man scale, then we should be able to put twenty people on each side and get a near picture-perfect simulation of medieval combat, right? Especially with miniatures, where we can second-by-second track line-of-sight, force field-like attacks-of-opportunity, and arrow-by-arrow ammo counts. Spells have interlaced count-down casting times. Weapons have speeds and reaches. It should be perfect!

It often isn't, and again, the too micro level of detail breaks down, and you more feel like you are playing a miniatures gaming rules simulator than you anything remotely realistic. The game doesn't know if it wants to be battle chess, a simulation or reality, or a miniatures combat game. Many games try to be everything and fail at everything. Some adopt a "way of thinking" almost like a war-gaming ideology and shoehorn that mantra-like system onto every action, even if it doesn't fit or should be handled by the referee as a one-off without the rules.

You have to be careful with games that dive into too low level of detail, or that try to simulate reality at too granular a level. There will be tons of individual rules simulating how a dagger cuts through leather armor and how that wound affects movement based on hit location and it will look cool and feel great when it happens in game. It is the same thing as the small Russian squad on the Eastern Front holed up in a snow-locked farmhouse holding off an entire onslaught of German attacks, tanks, and aircraft, becoming the heroes of the Eastern Front. Those are cool moments in isolation (and the latter is a great small scale scenario), but in the context of a larger system, they take up too much time and attention from what should be a balanced and even attention of time and focus upon the large system being simulated.

If the game is about a story adventure, yes, a wounded leg may play into that, but are the rules around getting that wounded leg so heavy they take away from the larger story-based experience the designer wanted to focus on for the game? Are all the characters in the story walking around with wounded legs, hands, eyes, clavicles, sprains, pulled muscles, and bandages covering cuts so they won't bleed to death, and the king and queen of Storyville are sitting there wondering why this group isn't in the hospital because they are in no shape to find out who stole the king's crown? If the game is about intrigue, make it about intrigue, and there is a laudable design goal to de-emphasizing things in the rules that may take away from that experience.

You can't put everything in a game and expect it does everything well. Imagine Monopoly with tax forms, IRS requirements, local zoning ordinances specific to each color group, investment income, random events like hotel fires, slumps and building booms, random economic events, a stock market, union protests, a global economy, industrial development charts, WW2 breaking out, populist elections, political wheeling and dealing, and so many layers of detail that yes - this is how a real real estate economy works, and it should all be in there, right?

After all, a game without this level of detail that focused just on buying, selling, building would be seen as too simplistic and not worthy of a true real estate game, right?

No, that stuff doesn't belong, and the job of a good game designer often lies in saying "this is what my game is about" and cutting the cruft and "cool features" that worm their way in during design. "Too many cooks" is a real problem in game design, as is "the cook doesn't know what he wants" or "the cook is trying to copy the best features of several dishes."

It's a taco with Kung Pao chicken, refried beans, pizza sauce, wrapped in a hamburger, and wrapped in a spicy gordita with cheese melted on top.

You get games that are like that, and you get things like that at taco place. It looks great on the menu, but it is typically something you eat only once if you are crazy enough to buy in. Or you're so embarrassed you bought one you start defending it and selling it to your friends.

But seriously, there is such a thing as focus in game design, and games that know what they are trying to do and focusing every rule - from character design, combat, skill use, exploration, and interaction one that one activity and making the parts that matter...matter. They also eliminate the cruft, pointless small simulation, and unneeded detail, and focus on delivering the core experience in the best way possible. If this game is about dungeoning, then let's focus on dungeoning. If this is a storytelling game, let's deliver the best storytelling rules possible and cut out the rest.

Again, we go back to design. This is what makes great products, from cell phones to role playing games.

The D&D/Pathfinder/Star Wars/etc Formula

It's helpful to study the 'formulas' behind games in order to understand them better. I was reading this very insightful post about monsters over on Jeff's Gameblog, and also reading the intro to the D&D4 Essentials DM Guide on 'what D&D is.' In essence, D&D is a traditional fantasy agglomeration, with a couple D&D 'staples' added to it to create the D&D 'feel'. Let's consider what these staples are, and try to break things down a little.

It is probably easy to see most of D&D's 'staples' are mostly items not covered under the OGL (trademarked and product-identity), and a couple that are loosely, but strongly identified with D&D. The drow, beholders, carrion crawlers, color-wheel dragons, Lovecraft-borrowed mind-flayers, Grayhawk gods, Faerun, fireball/sleep/wish spells, vanician magic, and a bunch of other staples come to mind. Toss in D&D4, and you get world-specific creations such as the Shadowfell, Faewild, along with a bunch of other races, places, and things.

This is similar to Microsoft's software strategy of 'embrace and extend' although applied to a fantasy-fiction setting. D&D likes to be the everygame, "Yeah, we've got that too." The next thing that usually happens is, "Oh, and have you seen this new D&D specific baddie? It sure is cool!" The same happens with Paizo's Pathfinder, it has all the traditional fantasy staples, then teases with world-specific bad guys, modules, organizations, or other content not under the OGL. With Microsoft software, they will take an open standard, and then enhance it to the point where the Microsoft solution is the de-facto standard.

It is not a bad strategy, and it presents players with a lot of value-added content in terms of product support and player familiarity. Where it falls short is in longevity and openness. When the D&D4 books are resigned to the shelf of history, and D&D8 is out and the hot new thing, all that content is versioned away, unsupported, and locked into books that will most likely never be printed or used much again. The supported proprietary content that made the game 'cool' is no longer supported, old, and locked up behind a license that makes it unsupportable by third parties, even under fair-use in many cases.

The OGL helps, and is a good thing for the most part (but falls woefully short in terms of electronic fair-use, etc). At least items under the OGL can be resurrected and used in new forms, bet then again, the OGL is a printed text-only license, and this limitation restricts games and other interactive entertainment. It is a good solution, but only goes halfway. We simply don't know how RPGs will evolve, how they will be played, and how creators will share content in the future; and supporting a license that restricts distribution holds the evolution of RPGs back in a way. The current OGL games are fun, cool, well-done, and craetive - but they don't advance the evolution of how RPGs are played, so they are holding back innovation.

In SBRPG, we banned using copyrighted content for a reason - we wanted you to create your own IP, and license it any way you wanted. If you wanted everything to be free and open, so be it, hop on over to Creative Commons and grab a license for your stuff, and create away. The SBRPG game itself was closed-source, it's the best we could do at the time when we wrote it. The ideas you create with it are yours however, and you could share them in any way you wish.

Everything Is Paid For, Feel Free to Break It

One of the most liberating pieces of game mastering advice I ever read was contained in an old module for the first edition of the Paranoia game, by West End Games. The final battle between the troubleshooters and the communists was happening in a reactor room, and the module writer put this line in the battle scene:

“Everything is Paid for, So Feel Free to Break It”

The line meant that every NPC, prop, piece of machinery, robot, scaffold, window, vehicle, weapon, computer console, whatever - was breakable and destroyable in the final battle. The referee shouldn’t feel guilty about the players wrecking the place with rocket launchers and cone rifles, and similarly, all the players equipment (and their clones) were similarly wreck-able. There were no magic swords to feel guilty about snapping in half, protect pieces of magic plate mail to avoid scratching, and Gandalf’s magic robes could be ripped to shreds.

The whole skewering of RPG sacred cows and signature player items felt liberating, and   it gave me a sense of freedom that other games lacked. Not that I wanted to be a mean referee, but it reinforced the idea of ‘everything being at risk and on the table’ when a party of players goes into  dungeon or other dangerous area.

Many games have rules for these types of situations, and in my experience, they are rarely applied. Sometimes this is due to complexity, and many times it is because the referee would feel guilty about breaking a player’s favorite toy. In 3.5 and Pathfinder, if a party gets caught in the blast of an enemy’s fireball spell, a lot of items need to make saving throws. Armor and weapons may be destroyed, potion bottles may shatter, wooden staffs and shields may be embers, spell books may be set ablaze, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff will happen. Granted, having to make hundreds of saving throws for items is a huge pain, but the rules are there, and this was their intent for including them (this goes all the way back to AD&D, in fact).

Personally, I do not feel the guilt of applying this rule, because the feeling that the risk of losing your favorite weapon, armor, NPC, or magic item increases the danger and risk involved in a mission, and really, part of what it is to be a hero. Losing Excalibur but still saving the princess is the stuff of which legends are made.

A caveat: If thou shalt take away, thou shalt not be stingy in replacing these things either. It is only fair for the players, and actually creates an economy for replacing broken gear. The gear soldiers take onto the battlefield isn’t invulnerable, rifles break, kevlar vests need replacing, vehicles become unfixable wrecks, and boots wear out. The one consistent theme in this idea is that the hero is more powerful than the gear; and when that gear fails, the moment comes for the hero to improvise, get creative, and overcome. Why deny a hero that moment?

Get There From Here

If there are four words which describe a game design philosophy succinctly, for us, they have to be "Get there from here."

Back in Maine, they had a saying, "You can't get there from here." Maine's coast is a maze of inlets, islands, rivers, and confusing roads. You can have two towns 10 miles apart, and it takes 50 miles of driving to get from one to the other. Tourists asking for directions would often be told, "You can't get there from here" in such situations, where they were hopelessly lost, and needed to backtrack a long way to get where they were going.

"Get there from here" is the opposite, and in game design means, "You can get the same or similar play experience easier, faster, and with less hassle using another game." Take basic dungeoneering, for example. If I were to play a simple "explore the dungeon and take the treasure game" with a new group of players, would I use full-featured game such as Pathfinder or d20 SRD, or a simpler retro-clone such as Labyrinth Lord? For me, the answer is simple, I would use Labyrinth Lord. The game is simple to understand, fast to roll characters up in, and simple to play. More importantly, it simulates 90% of the "dungeon action" I am looking for with this group, without going into complicated areas like skill points, thousands of spells to read, and a huge framework of character creation rules. Labyrinth Lord "gets there from here" a lot easier than other games, when all I am looking for is the basic dungeon experience.

We will often break a game down into its core activities, and then separate out all the rules and fluff. You isolate the core of why you are playing, and then contrast that with other games that do the same thing. If the other game is simpler, and gets you to the fun faster, that game does a better job at delivering the fun. Of course, if you are a fan of a rule set, "get there from here" does not change that, but it is important to understand the complexity you pay to reach the fun you desire. A lot of games don't understand this math, or it gets lost in a sea of expansions and options.

"Get there from here" can also be applied to rule design. Does the rule system you are building for a game deliver the intended outcome simply and without too much trouble? Or does the rules subsystem require a huge complicated procedure that could be optimized and streamlined? If the point is the complexity, that is one thing; but if the fun of the game is elsewhere, why spend the time when a simple rule will suffice?

Getting Off the Train

We were in our local hobby shop the other day, and had a discussion with a fellow game-master about the Pathfinder adventure path The Jade Regent. The GM mentioned he didn't like the adventure, since the story required the PCs to travel with a convoy of NPCs to the farthest reaches north, cross the arctic, and save the princess. The players did not like the NPCs, balked at getting on the convoy, and just wanted to run off and do something else.

Roleplaying is strange like that, players can up and decide to go east when the path leads west, decide the plot of the movie isn't for them, and frequently revel in the chance to take the railroad off road. Pathfinder's adventure paths are kind of like mini-movies, and you think by agreeing to play one, players would suspend their free spirits for a while, and play through and see what happens. We didn't really delve too deeply into the circumstances, and the GM could have been using the adventure as his weekly session, so there are a couple unknowns there, to be honest.

We wrote SBRPG with the spirit of player freedom as one of the central concepts in the game. We explicitly say that GMs should not write adventures, period. All interaction in the game's sandbox should be through the game's internal faction system, and players should get out there and makes things happen. It is a different take from most games, in that SBRPG requires players to be active participants in the world, with only minimal plot decisions being made by the referee. The referee can set the stage, like having the crying dame setup the next mystery for the private eye to solve, but beyond that point, the players should drive the action.

It requires strong improvisational skills from the referee, the ability to track plots, and quickly come up with 'what's next?' The referee can set the stage for the next part, such as the car chase by the bad guys trying to silence the gumshoe, the frantic call by the lady in red saying someone is following her, and the big reveal by the bad guy and mad scientist attempting to escape in the building-top zeppelin. 'What's next' can be mini-scenarios, story parts, and anything in the dramatic book that advances the plot (or not, it depends). Getting to these points is up to the players, and they need to be active participants in the story.

It is different than your traditional dungeon experience, where players can only go where the tunnel leads next, or an event-based story where players proceed from one prepackaged situation to the next. The closest analogy for SBRPG's gameplay is to the Grand Theft Auto games, where the player is the motivator, and the sandbox provides endless opportunities for danger, involvement, natural hazards, monsters, NPC interaction, and fun activities. The price players must pay is adopting the 'go out there and do something' play style, and the GM determines 'what's next.'

Difficulty Adjustment as a Game Balance Tool

There is a fascinating discussion over on the Pathfinder message boards. A GM has a fellow GM as a player in his game, and the GM-as-player has the opinion that 3.5 is horribly unbalanced towards casters, and wonders if Pathfinder follows the same design mantra. Notice here, we are not focusing on 3.5 or Pathfinder, we are talking about design.

Gauss (in the second post) says, "Also: Pathfinder almost universally dropped the CRs of monsters by 1. The effect of this is that monsters have slightly higher saves and more hitpoints. This benefits the martial classes."

Wow. Interesting take on this. Paizo dropped the power of an entire class by just adjusting encounter challenge ratings. This is a wonderful example of using difficulty to balance a class and its powers, without touching the powers or class itself.

Most game designers would first consider adjusting the powers, tweaking spell resistance rules, fixing the class, adjusting monster defenses, or any number of other fixes that would take a long time to iterate over the data in a game's lists. Game design is tough, and going back over your existing data can break lots of stuff. Instead, Paizo used their CR system, and tweaked it to put melee characters on an even keel with spellcasters - and they made the adjustment backwards on the existing system.

Examples of great game design techniques are hard to find, but I think we found one here.

Chocolate Frosting in Dungeon Encounters

Let's pause the game design discussion for a moment, and talk about refereeing. This is brought up by the thoughts on toy-box designs we just had, and I felt it was an interesting discussion tangentially related to all that.

I had this discussion with George last night, and it seems like a lost point on many published modules and adventures. If you are playing a fantasy game, and enter a crypt of undead- sealed off for 500 years. Let's say the first room is a trap where the doors seal and a flood of skeletons surge into the chamber, weapons ready, and the dust of tombs floating in the air.

I asked George, "Shouldn't those weapons be rusted to nothingness, and the skeletons fragile and their bones snap if tested?" George agreed, and I called the concept the "chocolate frosting" on the encounter - that extra special detail you normally wouldn't have thought of, that when added, makes sense and actually enhances the experience.

Sure, having the skeleton's weapons break when they hit the characters' weapons and armor sure reduces the difficulty of the encounter, and snapping arms off of the undead during grapple attempts kinda defeats the purpose of the skeletons grabbing for the characters in the first place - but it is cool, and it fits the encounter. If you need to, increase the difficulty with a hazard, trap, or more skeletons - but keep the chocolate frosting on the encounter to maintain the unique and memorable quality.

Let's take the opposite approach, and equip the skeletons with brand-new weapons, give them full hit points, and normal grapple attempt chances - book standard stuff. Boring stuff actually, without special flavor and this certainly won't be remembered like the previous version. There is something about the ferocity of an undead creation attacking as it breaks up and crumbles away that is so horrifying, it will stick in the player's minds for a long time. This is the stuff legends are made of, and great storytelling.

You can put chocolate frosting on any encounter with a little thought and imagination. Lizardmen in a swamp? Let's make them hunters, with spears coated in paralyzing poison, bolas, and hooked nets. Coat their skin in a slippery slime, either natural or applied before the hunt, and give them a couple archers with arrows that explode into a pungent skunk-like tracking scent that lasts for days. What was once ordinary is now cool and unique, and will stick in you player's minds (and their character's nostrils) for a long time.

Craft your encounters and situations like you would make a cake, don't just stop with the book-standard creatures and opponents - put that extra layer of detail and super-specialness on them that fits who they are and what they are doing. Your players will love your work, and you will get that extra-special feeling of satisfaction that a master chef gets with a perfectly-crafted dish.